


Dead

by emmaliza



Category: Degrassi, Degrassi High, Degrassi the Next Generation
Genre: (nothing actually happens but the possibility is alluded to), Angst, Episode: s01e01-2 Mother and Child Reunion, Guilt, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Imprisonment, M/M, Multi, Pining, post-School's Out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:34:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25901401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emmaliza/pseuds/emmaliza
Summary: "If I'm dead to you, why areyouhauntingme?"In which ten years is a long time, prison is lonely, and Wheels does not move on.
Relationships: Archibald "Snake" Simpson/Derek "Wheels" Wheeler, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 4





	Dead

**Author's Note:**

> This fandom/pairing is never going to let go of me, is it? Ah well.

Shaving his head is one of the first things he does after he gets officially put away. He's quick to realise that long blond curls are hardly an advantage in his current situation, and so he has to get rid of them. He tries to look tougher than he is, but the glasses, those stay in place. He has to be able to see.

He lucks out in the cellmate situation. Damian, he's in his mid-forties, put away for low-level drug offences, with kids on the outside. He should despise Wheels for having killed a kid, but instead he seems to think him hardly more than a kid himself, and wants to protect him. "Don't you worry about them," he says when Wheels notices older men leering outside their cell bars. "Anyone tries anything, you just tell me, and I'll take care of it."

Wheels wants to protest, to insist he can take care of himself, but he can't. Not here. He needs Damian's protection, and he's grateful for it; he tries not to think about how he's meant to earn it. He doesn't belong in this place, that much is obvious to everyone around him, but there's not exactly anywhere else he can go, is there?

He still gets letters from his classmates sometimes. Most of them - the ones who haven't graduated - don't really understand what happened, and so they share their wishes that he'll be out of prison soon, that he can join them in their senior year, that everything will go back to normal.

There's one person whose letter never comes. It burns inside him at night, keeps him up worse than the two-year-old who will never wake again because of him.

* * *

"Didn't he write you? He said he would."

He still sees Joey sometimes, although less and less with every passing month. He's still at school. Things are awkward between him and Tessa, inevitably, but Joey says he avoids her as much as possible, tries to let her get on with her life. Wheels doesn't feel like he's in much of a position to judge.

And Joey is still in contact with Snake, who is off at university, living the life he was always meant to, bright and brilliant. "He says he's going to be a teacher, can you believe it?"

Yes, Wheels can believe that entirely. "Why won't he talk to me?" he asks, although he knows perfectly well why.

"Just give him time, man."

Time won't make a difference, but he does it anyway. What choice does he have?

* * *

He has a tattoo on his ankle. It seemed sensible, when he noticed one of his fellow prisoners was offering, to make himself seem less sheltered and less safe. It hurt, but Wheels could hardly claim he didn't deserve the pain. The tattoo he chose was hardly creative or individual, but it made him seem tougher, for whatever that was worth.

Damian was watching, in case this guy pushed too far, hurt Wheels too badly, and embarrassing as it was Wheels couldn't help but feel grateful for that. He wonders if someone watching, like really watching, like actually knowing what he thought and felt, would have made things different.

The viper curls around his leg so tight he almost hisses at night. He knows he's just torturing himself, but he cannot let go.

* * *

His grandma does not come to see him. Why should she, she's been looking for an excuse to give up on him for years, and he can hardly claim he didn't provide her one. He can't even bring himself to be mad about it; it's not like he _wants_ to see her.

"It's a shame you don't have any family come visit you," Damian tells him, with his usual paternal warmth, either not knowing or not caring what he has done. "Everyone deserves to be looked after."

Maybe they do, but Wheels hates thinking about who does and does not deserve what, that way lies madness ( _does Snake deserve to live a happy life with his college degree? Or is that just what his parents bought him?)._ "I doubt it," he mutters, with experienced cynicism.

* * *

The last time he sees Joey is in 1997, with a head as bald as his own, when he comes to complain about some woman he's met at the dealership, who he's impossibly in love with. Impossible, because she's already married. "She keeps telling me she'd like to drive to the other side of the country, to leave everything behind, what the hell does that mean?" And Wheels shrugs like he fucking knows.

Wheels still writes letters sometimes, not letters he ever sends, because it's pointless if he doesn't even know where Snake is - but his heart comes out in letters regardless. "Man, who are you writing to?" Damian drawls as he watches him scratch it out, because his wife, after five years, still comes to see him every single week; he could never understand. "Must be someone special, if she doesn't even visit and you still worry about her."

He laughs, paper course beneath his fingers. "Oh, she is," he says, the lie coming easily to him - everyone hooks up in prison but no-one comes out; that's just drawing a target on yourself he doesn't care to have.

"Then why doesn't she come see you?" Damian asks. "If she's so special?"

Wheels flinches. "She doesn't come see me because she's special," he says, imagining Snake as he must be now, out of college and off teaching, so good and so pure and so right, far better off for not having Wheels in his life. "Because she's too good for that. I'm afraid I can't have her, ever again."

* * *

He still dreams of Snake sometimes, when he really doesn't want to, feeling something carved upon his soul. It could be an act of spite - even if Snake thinks he can just cut Wheels out of his life, he cannot make Wheels do the same.

In his dreams he's still nineteen, with a stupid mullet and stupidly tight jeans, cut up and bleeding from the crash. He always will be, he supposes.

Prison orange doesn't suit Snake. It makes him look even paler and gawkier than he usually did. "You disgust me," he mutters in between kisses as he pushes Wheels back onto his narrow cell bed. "You're a prisoner. A traitor. A _murderer._ You're dead to me, Wheels."

"I know," Wheels says, Snake's hand clamped possessively across his chest. "But if I'm dead to you, why are _you_ haunting _me_?"

He wakes up in the confines of his cell, hot and cold and alone again, naturally.

* * *

When he's released it's Mike who offers him a place to stay, of all people. He seems to feel guilty: he gave him up in the hopes he'd have a better life, only for that to backfire massively upon everyone. Still, a place to stay is a place to stay. It's not 'til he's out he learns his grandpa died a few years back, and grandma didn't last long after him. No-one even bothered to tell him.

He sits outside the shiny newfangled facade of Degrassi Community School, waiting, though he has no idea what for. He's not going in - Joey, as gently as possible, made it clear on the phone he wouldn't be welcome. He's already spoken to, apologised to Lucy. She looked a lot better. That's something, he supposes.

Someone comes rushing out of the entrance. _Snake_. He looks older - Wheels should have realised he would. He's almost as bald as Wheels himself is, he notes with some amusement. For a second he thinks Snake must be after him, that Lucy must have told him he was here, that he's _finally_ coming to see him, if only to punch his lights out for daring to show up.

But he isn't. He's in such a hurry he never even notices Wheels; he hops into a car and is quickly followed by, um, someone - Spike, he soon realises. He didn't recognise her at first without the hair, but no, that's her. It probably means nothing, but still, they sure seem awfully comfy together, huh?

"Hey man. Cool tattoo."

He turns and sees someone sitting next to him on the bench. One of the students here, he assumes, the kid can't be older than fourteen. He has close-cropped brown curls and acne and a jean jacket, with a bottle in hand - beer or soda, he can't tell. He looks like the tough guy type, the sort who'll inevitably end up where Wheels did. Wheels never looked the jailbird. _He won't have to shave his head on the first day._

"Thanks." The snake inscribed upon his ankle is only visible when he sits down. Presumably, this kid would think it less cool if he new what it meant to him: the one person he could never have and yet, could never let go.

He sighs and gets up, headed back to the bus stop. Dead men don't attend high school reunions. 


End file.
